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E-Dialog enters mobile marketing via M3 acquisition

Email marketing service provider e-Dialog has acquired mobile marketing firm M3 for an undisclosed amount.

Mobile Marketer?s Courtney Muir interviewed John Rizzi, president/CEO of e-Dialog, Burlington, MA, regarding the deal.

Here is what he had to say:

What is the strategy behind the acquisition?
For e-Dialog?s clients, mobile marketing represents a tremendous opportunity. It represents one of the fastest-growing marketing channels today, with just about every person carrying an SMS-enabled phone.

Furthermore, as smartphones become more popular and advanced, the mobile marketing industry is expected to experience four-fold growth over the next four years.

As an email marketing service provider, the acquisition of M3 allows e-Dialog clients to take advantage of the broad reach of SMS.

Clients will now be able to easily leverage SMS messaging as a tool to enhance customer response to new and existing email programs.

They can also take advantage of M3?s award-winning services to deliver sophisticated and highly interactive mobile marketing campaigns that make use of mobile coupons, sweepstakes and surveys.

E-Dialog and M3 share the goal of helping clients create a meaningful customer experience in our respective channels.

By combining our technology and expertise, we can help our clients achieve that goal in email and mobile.

How do the two companies complement one another?
From a cultural standpoint, e-Dialog and M3 share the same spirit of innovation and commitment to client success that have made our organizations successful independently.

From a business perspective, our combined service will let e-Dialog and M3 clients to draw on e-Dialog?s tools for data segmentation and personalization.

With a 360-degree view of the customer and a deep understanding of his or her behavior and preferences, clients will be able to manage highly targeted campaigns in HTML, SMS, and MMS thanks to our combined technology, infrastructure and expertise.

What does this mean for e-Dialog?
The acquisition of M3 significantly enhances the mobile marketing capabilities we can provide to our clients.

Additionally, it allows our clients to manage campaigns across multiple digital channels using a single marketing services vendor.

That is critical, as our clients have expressed an urgent need to be able to closely manage targeted messages in multiple channels, and more importantly focusing efforts on the channel that matters most to a particular customer, whether it?s in email or via a mobile device.

It is difficult to manage cross-channel campaigns when the technology vendors and essential data are not connected.

What does this mean for M3?
There are obvious synergies between mobile and email marketing communication strategies, and in fact M3 had been helping clients to effectively connect with customers through email for years.

Becoming a part of e-Dialog will enable M3 to accelerate global adoption of its platform, and provide clients with access to an advanced, world-class email marketing service.

In addition, the increase in available resources will ensure that M3 is well positioned to meet the evolving needs of mobile marketing clients.

How much is the deal worth?
We are not disclosing the terms of the acquisition.

What should the industry expect to come from this merger?
E-Dialog?s expansion into mobile represents a necessary step towards a multichannel marketing vision.

Marketers can no longer afford to view these channels independently.

We know that today?s customers expect to receive the right message at the right time, but they increasingly expect to receive that message in the right channel. Or, more importantly, in the channel that they prefer.

Marketing service providers will need to be well-positioned to help marketers address these expectations from their customers, and e-Dialog and M3 will be focused on delivering on that promise on behalf of their clients.